I heard this story on the BBC World Service this morning. It’s about Ana Escobar, a mother whose daughter Esther Sulamita was stolen from her last year, when she was only six months old. Ana was locked up by armed men who stole Esther from her, and, according to BBC, Ana was “at the [Guatemalan] National Adoption Council’s offices in May [and] saw a toddler she was convinced was Esther.”

I can only imagine what went through Ana’s head when she saw her baby girl. And I wonder what she said and did to get a DNA test performed, how hard she must have fought to get her daughter back.

The DNA test proved that Ana was Esther’s mother, and Esther is now back with her mother.

As a parent of two young children, this story hits me particularly close to home. And while I know full well that there are literally hundreds of millions of daily stories of hardship, cruelty and deprivation every day in this world of ours, the fact that somewhere out there someone is stealing babies from their mothers is too much for me to get my head around.

I don’t even know where to begin on this one. It’s just too sad and makes me wish that some values were truly universal, that some cruelties would be unacceptable to absolutely everyone, no matter what.